Ebadi was Iran’s first female judge, but after the revolution women were barred from that role, so she restarted her career as a lawyer. She took on pro-bono cases defending citizens who faced arbitrary arrest or domestic violence and argued for fundamental human rights in court. Her advocacy for women and children, who are often disadvantaged under certain interpretations of Islamic law, gained national and international attention. In the 1990s she founded the Center for the Defence of Human Rights and built a broad civil-society network. Although her work involved criticizing the government and led to threats and brief arrests, she never gave up on freedom of speech and the development of democracy.

Ebadi scrutinised the compatibility between international human-rights treaties and Iranian domestic law, and explicitly cited those treaties in court. She relied on the Convention on the Rights of the Child and, though Iran has not ratified it, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women to contest gender-biased provisions in family law such as custody and inheritance. By publicising judicial decisions through the media she expanded deliberation in the public sphere. During the July 1999 student protests she joined the defence team for detained students and denounced torture. She also cooperated with international NGOs to draft human-rights reports on Iran and submit them to the UN Human Rights Council, thus engaging in multi-layered advocacy.

Ebadi’s strategy can be characterised as an “internal reform approach” that invokes international norms within the domestic legal order and engages in interpretive dialogue with Islamic jurists. She filed cases challenging discriminatory provisions such as unequal testimonial value and diya (blood money), leveraging the pluralism of Sharia interpretations to exert incremental pressure for precedent change. At the Centre for the Defence of Human Rights she built a case-law database and trained a cadre of young lawyers with international literacy. In early-2000s hearings before the Revolutionary Court she invoked ICCPR Article 14 to demand public trials and highlighted the release of courtroom videos as a matter of procedural justice. Her work exemplifies legal mobilisation as a social-movement tactic and contributes to the construction of a transnational human-rights regime.